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Oh, I'm not putting all the crap on, Merc, just the useful stuff. Got just about everything I need now, if you exclude the fac that I had to put my hand in my pocket to get ordinary CD-burning function. (That's not fair or reasonable: people houldn't have to run a nuke-everything recovery CD in...

Congratulations Bozo. You just won my Silliest Post of the Week Award. Every motherboard manufacturer on my list above uses VIA chipsets, but only two of them — A-Trend/PC-Chips and ASUS — manage to stuff them up so comprehensively. (No, correct that, MSI can also make a right royal stuff up out...

Cancel the PPS. I found it

Drag and Drop Works! Cool! It's a really neat, simple CD & bDVD burning app. For $19 US, it's a bargain. (I was a bit concerned that it would require that I already havd V3 installed, but it doesn't. It is, after all, billed as an "upgrade" price.) Just the same, the fact that I have to do this...

ASUS bashing? Huh? That was being kind to them! Seriously now, of all the motherboards we have dealth with in recent years, ASUS have been the worst. I mean it: clearly the worst of the lot. Note, however, that we generally try to steer clear of the known crap manufacturers: PC-Chips and the...

Oh, for the love of Mike! It's now burning the seventh CD. This is ribloodydiculous. Especially when I strongly suspect that it's a complete waste of time. Looks like these things do a complete nuke everything recovery, so they are going to be unusable. The only point I can see to them is for...

Well, I'm a bit sorry I let Tea talk me into this. The Thinkpad arrived today (not before time) and it's a weird-looking little thing, but that's OK. I don't care what it looks like. What concerns me is the stupid software setup. Let me tell you about the dscs you get with the system...

No. No. Please no. Please don't inflict an ASUS board on yourself. Buy something reliable. Buy something that doesn't have such a stupidly long and ridiculous list of component compatibility restrictions that you can't even buy RAM for it without problems. Buy something where they actually tell...

Leadtek? ASUS? I'm only guessing though, as 2D quality isn't really an issue with the resolutions I run. (1280 max: I have yet to see any monitor thatt I'd regard as usable over 1280 x 1024. Well, an LCD, of course, but not in CRT. And I own a 22 inch Mitsubishi. It runs, of course, on a G450...

None to speak of. They don't even bother with a fan. All this talk of Nvidia vs ATI video quality, BTW, is hogwash. Video quality is about attention to detail and quality components on the part of the card manufacturer.

No, it wouldn't make sense. Dual layer burners are in their infancy still. They are neither mature nor stable. In a few months time, the current crop of dual layer burners will have gone the way of SIPP RAM and the 8-track cartridge. Once the burner technology settles down, and once the media...

Don't be rude, Tea.

Scratch the "nearly all", Vlad, and I agree with you 100%. Seagate have had some utter dogs. Samsung used to make the worst drives in the universe. IBM had a huge fruit-up not so long ago. Maxtor have made more dud drives than I have had hot dinners. And Random Digital go up and down like a...

Oh, and I forgot to mention what we do when asked for a 200GB drive for audio work. Rather than flirt with the uncertain reliability of a Seagate or a Western Digital, we tell the customer to buy two Samsung 120GB units. Most of them do just that. Notice, by the way, what this says about my...

I agree, Mercutio. But the time is fast aproaching when 200 to 300 GB drives will start selling. Right now we are starting to sell almost as many 120GB units as 80GB, and the odd 160GB now and then. That suggests to me that we will start moving drives in the 200+ class quite soon now ... Let's...

Not quite, little one. Presidential hair is sort of the opposite of pubic hair. You can easily tell if it's presidential hair because it's always in close proximity to an aresho .... er ... to a bottom.

And I don't see that much proofreading. No elephant stamps for you today Tea.

I hear you loud and clear. This business of stumbling through the PHP, gradually getting the site just the way you want it, and then applying the new, latest must-have upgrade to the software so that you can start applying your desired patches all over again ... It's got knobs on!

I practically never defrag. Defragging makes bugger-all difference to my machines. I suspect that this is because of my normal usage pattern: Install OS; install the apps that I'm likely to use (these rarely change: 95% of what I'll do on a system during the 2 years or so that it's likely to...

Thanks BW. Guess I should have read this thread earlier!

There is no danger of me buying a 64-bit Radeon. Or a 13487-bit Radeon. Or any Radeon. :-? Seriously now, the graphics card universe divides into three parts. 1: Entry-level, in Oz dollars, about $100, typically $70 to $150. Acounts for roughly 85-95% of all sales. Gforce 4MX, Gforce 4000...

Tannin: The 3200 sems to be the one to have. CityK: On what basis, price/performance ratio? Errr .... What other basis is there? Assuming equal reliability and ease of use (both things you can take as read with almost ay CPU), that is close enough as not to matter to being the only thing that...

Err .. as an afterthought, I bought three of them, one each for three often-used machines. I'd buy one more, except that I haven't figured out how to fit an X15 into my laptp yet.

What E_Dawg said.

The biggest advantage would be actually being able to buy the part, Bookmage. AMD are discontinuing all the lower-end and mid-range Athlon XPs. In fact, it's probably worth making up a table: Low-end Athlon XP parts: 2000, 2200, and 2400. All 256K cache, 133MHz FSB. All discontinued. Replaced...

Me. Reason? Habit. Plus it ain't broke. I've downloaded Firefox once or twice, installd it, thought "this seems fine", then forgotten to use it. As a general rule, I use IE when I'm being Tea (save fussing with multipe logins, easy to remember which sock I'm wearing at the moment), Opera 6.05...

Tea seems to be having a lot of trouble with analogies lately. Shall I try? Yes? (Oh, allright then.) (Showoff.) Buying laptops without three year warranties is like shipping a dozen eggs without a egg carton. (Better little one?) (Yez.) (See. It's easy when you know how.) (So. What'z it...

Tea!

Exactly.

Tea, that's not fair. You should never kick a man while he's down.

South Afriica![/b] Woohoo! What a team. What a swim! Yes! And the Dutch were in there too. Oz in Sydney, and now SA on Athens. I love it.

To expand a bit on what the little hairy one has to say, we are mega busy these days, and when we do visit, we read a good deal more than we post. (I mean sites in general, not SR or SF in particular.) Perhaps that is a sign of maturity or something. (Who? Me? Mature?) (No, not you, Tea.)...

A sugar harvestor costs $750,000 and is useless for anything except sugar. I've forgotten most of what I know about the politics and economics of sugar, but I'm clear enough on the practicalities. There are vast areas of coastal north-east Australia that depend almost entirely on the sugar...

Err .... Tea? What's an "on-trusted site"?

I confess to feeling a little tolerant scorn when I see someone suddenly discover the sort of effortless multitasking ability that I used to take for granted ten years ago (and on far more modest hardware). Or, for that matter, the sort of ability that Amiga users claimed to have substantially...

I figure I better shout the next round, Tea. Otherwise they will all hate me. Now excuse me a moment.... Bartender!

I know, Tea, I know. But it needed saying. For some peculiar reason, the powers that be at Storage Forum have this weird fetish against editing posts. I have no idea why. Hell — you can edit posts at the Bird Forum, edit as often as you like, and BF has over 12,000 members and between 500...

Bahhhh .... Providing members with the means to edit their own posts is only a basic courtesy. Any member who abuses that ability is the sort of member we don't want anyway. If the person is worth spending any time with (as all of you are, gentlemen and friends) then the person will have a...

Quite so. The average production life for a new drive is about 9 months. The manufacturers, when they stop making a particular model, run off a certain number of extra drives so that they have enough to cover warranty replacements. Then, say a year or so after a given model goes EOL, they take...

PS. Full credit to Seagate for restoring a proper three year warranty. No credit at all to Seagate for the dishonest marketing trick that they have wrapped it up in. PPS: given the shonkiness of the fake "five year" warranty, do we really believe that they will honour the first three years...

Ahh ... but the point of the $6 isn't to provide any sort of service to Seagate customers — $6 is a joke, it costs around $20 just to go through the RMA paperwork and pay the freight — the point of the $6 is to allow Seagate's marketing droids to make ridiculous untrue waranty claims without...

There is no telling. Sometimes a single bad sector is a sign of fast-approaching disaster, sometimes the drive will gradually deteriorate over (say) six months, other times it will continue to give faithful service for years. It's the old Clint Eastwood school of computing rule.

Well, when you have a long, long line of successful products and then you have a complete lemon that destroys your reputation and costs you an incredibly large amount of money, most people would regard that as a pretty good reason to sell!

Hey a real question! Cool! In general, Collector, you need to format MFM drives via the BIOS on your controller card. It's getting to be a long, long time ago, and my memory has faded, but you normally do that by using DEBUG to jump to the appropriate entry point. Which address? Depends on the...

Nope. Given the same situation (no Samsung 80GB 7200s — our best-selling drive) I'd still apply the same solution: pay the $40 extra to use Samsung 120GB units. But, to save you spamming the thread with yet another question, Tea, if there were no 80GB Samsungs and no 120GB ones either, then...

Quite right, Little One. It is the key question. And the answer — at least so far as we are concerned — is almost certainly not. Mercutio again has the nub of the matter: the Samsung three year warranty is only the second (and distinctly the lesser) of the two reasons we like Samsung. The main...

I'm surprised. Very surprised. And delighted, I hasten to add. I'm only mildly surprised that a major manufacturer decided to address the short warranty problem — that really needed doing, and they must have been being bled white by the drift to Samsung. Sure, the Seagates and Maxtors of this...

Cheetahs are the only other drive I ever willingly use, Greg.

Quite right. A very fair statement. (Tannin pauses to relight his pipe, pour another scotch, decides to skip going to the gym tonight.)

I don't even ask the question about performance numbers anymore. Reliability (#1) and warranty (#2) count for so much more in the buying decision, and Samsung are so far in front of Seagate and Western Digital on both counts, that they could be the slowest and the most expensive and it just...